HarperCollins UK is launching a new fiction imprint called The Borough Press. The move marks the publisher’s summer 2014 relocation to the “Baby Shard”, the Renzo Piano-designed sister site to the recently opened Shard, Europe’s tallest building.

Led by HarperCollins publishing director Katie Espiner, the imprint’s authors will include Lionel Shriver and Tracy Chevalier, with its first release, Judith Allnatt’s novel The Moon Field, published in January 2014.

The imprint will be the new home of The Austen Project, which sees six contemporary authors reimagine Jane Austen’s classics, with Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, Curtis Sittenfeld and Alexander McCall Smith already announced.

Espiner said: “Our aim at The Borough Press is to bring the best writing to the widest possible audience, and in doing so create an identity around our authors which will come to represent a hallmark of quality for readers.”

The imprint will be part of HarperFiction, which also takes in Blue Door and HarperVoyager. The first acquisition for the press is Louisa Young’s The Heroes’ Welcome, a sequel to 2011’s My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You.

Shriver said she was “delighted to be on board” and added: “A class imprint, with a class editor at the top—a woman who’s smart, savvy, with good taste and the kind of dry, evil sense of humour that should be a requirement in publishing today. How could an author ask for more?”